A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon - New (Soma)tics

this mechanistic world…has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry

Since their 2005 inception, CAConrad’s (Soma)tic exercises have been summoning the whole spectrum of human experience in the name of poetry. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon collects 27 new and previously published exercises and their emerging poems, incorporating unorthodox steps in the writing process from the tangible everyday to the cosmos of the imagination. Together they manifest as an urgent call for a connective, concentrated, and unfettered creativity.

The world gives us cops and cops and cops and cops and cops, but CAConrad gives us Breton-trumping anarcho-lyric behavior and l’amo[u]r mundi fou.Anne Boyer

The (Soma)tic Exercises are innovative and crucial to our art form—they both invent a new genre and help increase freedom from the double tyrannies of both the tired narrative form and short, personal lyric form. Conrad must be one of the most original practitioners of poetry forging new territory. Sean Singer, The Rumpus

Conrad’s now-discursive, now-fragmentary poetry offers us a mirror we may hold up to ourselves, if only we dare; eccentric, insistent, passionate, and indubitably wide-eyed, it also reflects those precious human traits we too often leave by the wayside on our dreary, unprofitable, and finally destructive searches for well-assimilated lives and loves.Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

CAConrad's new book is a strange and wondrous collection of texts. Physically and emotionally intimate, by turns vulnerable, outrageous, and hilarious, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon asks that we seriously consider the power of poetry as a lived and embodied practice.Abraham Avnisan, Rain Taxi

It’s a book for people, I should say. Everyone can be found and find in it. When I go through the work, I like to think of Conrad as more of a guide than an author. He’s there working with you and for you. I like that—it’s a caring there. It made me happy.Tom Trudgeon, HTMLGiant

If the motto of the Situationists, with whom Conrad has much in common, was “Be realistic—demand the impossible!”, then a suggested motto for those wishing to proceed in the spirit of Conrad might be, “Be reasonable—do what is insane!”... Conrad’s most recent book of poems, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, is a guide to practical insanity. Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Exit Strata

CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for their mother and helping her shoplift. They are the author of 9 books of poetry and essays, including The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010); A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012); ECODEVIANCE (Wave Books, 2014), which won the 2014 Believer Poetry Award; and While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Lamda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, as well as the co-editor of Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. They are a Pew Fellow and have also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Object, and Ucross. For their books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films 2016), please visit www.CAConrad.blogspot.com.